Last week San Francisco played host to the Macworld Conference & Expo, the culmination of weeks of rumors and speculation that had the gadget-obsessed teetering on the brink of sanity.

Fake Steve Jobs said it best:

If you're pressed for time, the luscious Veronica Belmont (a title given to her by FSJ which I am further propagating) posted a video of the keynote, compressing the 90 minute presentation into 60 seconds.



The big announcement was of course the MacBook Air, which I found a little underwhelming as I really couldn't see its niche. The general consensus is that you can tell what Apple will release by trying to find holes in its product line. It's clear that there was a need for a device more portable than a MacBook and more functional than the iPhone. The industry was speculating everything from a sub-notebook, to a tablet, to a combination thereof.

It was assumed that after the recent release of the Eee PC by Asus, the Taiwanese manufacturer that supplies many of the components for Apple's laptops, that something similar would pop up with an Apple badge, nicer aesthetics, and a premium price tag.

Instead what we received was not so much a sub-notebook, but an anorexic MacBook. The laptop has a similar footprint to Apple's current laptops, yet could readily be considered a downgrade in almost every way except weight, thickness, and the multi-touch track pad. Merlin Mann of 43folders hit the nail on the head: "MacBook Air got small on the least interesting axis to me."

So who is this for? It's not meant to be a primary machine, and even as a secondary machine it doesn't deliver as much as a MacBook Pro for slightly more money or the MacBook for considerably less. It's great "if you're kinda rich and want a fourth computer," quipped Merlin.

That's pretty much the target audience. "I already ordered mine" said Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, hours after the keynote. It seems if you want a Mac, aren't too worried about the price tag or its inherent drawbacks compared to other laptops in its class (a travel laptop that doesn't allow you to change batteries?) then this is the laptop for you.

Gizmodo seems to have the same view, exemplified by this excerpt from an interview with Mike Abary, senior vice president of VAIO product marketing:

So there's your new Mac. Except Macworld really isn't about Macs anymore, is it? In fact, Macworld hasn't been about Macs for several years now thanks to Apple's resurgence in other markets.

Previous Macworld events had turned into iPod trade shows, with cases and accessories making up a significant chunk of the exhibitor list. Last year was completely devoid of Macs, with all attention being paid to the iPhone with a little Apple TV thrown in.

To give credit where it's due, there was more of a Mac presence this year. "I expected an iPhone show" said famous Photoshopper Bert Monroy while guest hosting on This Week in Tech, "but there was a return to a lot of Mac software". Leo Laporte, host of This Week in Tech agreed, "Microsoft released Office 2008, Intuit was here" referring to two companies that have historically been dragging their feet updating their Mac software.

There was also a respectable showing of Mac games, actually warranting their own pavilion this year. Aspyr Media won a Macworld Best of Show for its port of Guitar Hero III, and also demoed The Sims. CCP Games showed off EVE Online, and EA showed off Spore, though sadly you could only create characters. Not an impressive showing, but it was nice to see.

Aside from that however it's clear that Apple is focusing away from the Mac. In the last five years there have only been three new Macs introduced to the market; the MacBook Air this week, the MacBook in 2006, and the Mac mini in 2005. Despite changes to their names and internal components, Apple's professional laptops and desktops have remained fundamentally unchanged since 2003. Five years is a long time in the computer industry, and even longer for Apple.

The other announcements made by Apple this year further reflect this, with software updates to both the iPhone and Apple TV, the stars of last year's Expo - more underwhelming news from Apple, the updates having been long rumored and lacking in anything groundbreaking.

Movie rentals at $2.99 for old titles, $3.99 for new releases, and $4.99 for HD titles are coming to the iTunes Store and the Apple TV. The prices and selection are competitive compared to Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace, but fall short Netflix's offering.

Netflix stole some of Apple's thunder when it announced unlimited streaming access to all of its unlimited plan customers. Netflix's unlimited plans start at $8.99, which means for less than the price of two HD movies on iTunes you can have unlimited streaming access on Netflix. Netflix also offers 6000 titles for streaming, six times more than Apple's for-rent selection.

It seems then that Netflix is right on Apple's tail, offering more bang for your buck with similar services. However, other companies that have tried to compete with Apple have failed in one crucial area: getting content away from the computer and onto televisions and portable devices. Apple has the Apple TV and an install base of 100+ million iPods and 4 million iPhones. Netflix's service doesn't event work on Macs, much less other devices.

Netflix did make an announcement earlier in the month about a set top box built by LG Electronics that will deliver movies to HDTVs at no additional cost, save the price of the box itself. However it won't be available until at least the second quarter, and is still a far cry from Apple's offering.

Engadget sees this as a sign that the two companies, despite having similar strategies for bringing digital media to the consumer, are aiming at different audiences.

One thing remains clear, with products from Apple, Netflix, TiVo (via a collaboration with Amazon's Unbox), Microsoft, and the critically well received upstart VUDU, digital distribution has become a viable alternative to traditional outlets like TV and hard copy rentals and this makes the Writers Guild strike all the more poignant.

Our own FearTheReaper had this to say about the recent announcements.

But Apple TV's newfound features aren't just a game changer for current studio produced content. They lower the hurdle for new user-generated content as well. Apple TV now allows you to subscribe to podcasts without the need for a computer at all, leap frogging TiVo's own announcement about supporting HD podcasts later this quarter.

There was a strong focus on podcast training at Macworld this year. An entire studio was set up for the purpose of podcast production. Dozens of sessions were made available to attendees on how to raise the quality of production, how to connect with musicians and other artists to collaborate on projects, and how to monetize and market what you produce.

We're likely to see this trend continue as the line between podcasts and traditional programming becomes blurred. Again FTR offered some poignant thoughts.

There are already several well-produced shorts that exist only on the internet, and with the current mood of content producers towards studios, this strike could be the best thing that ever happened to digital distribution.

Another part of Macworld this year that had absolutely nothing to do with Macs was Web 2.0's presence. Pownce, the microblogging social network, held its launch party on Wednesday, celebrating its launch on January 22. Meanwhile, TechCrunch held its inaugural Crunchies, an award ceremony celebrating internet startups and innovators on Friday.

"I'm surprised there aren't more Web 2.0 companies exhibiting this year," said blogger Robert Scoble, "Google was one of the most popular booths." Indeed it was, and that was only partly due to them giving out Google socks, the only swag I relented on. As the line between desktop applications and web applications blurs we will see more exhibitors showing web only products.

It's clear that this show has become more than a gathering of Apple fanboys drooling over the latest toys from their favorite company. Just as Steve Jobs has transformed Apple from a computer manufacturer to a vehicle for digital production and distribution, so has the conference and the people who attend it.

AceT apologizes for the tardiness of this article, he was excitedly doing things and meeting people you probably couldn't care less about.

Not long ago Steve Jobs asked the world to...

In a bold statement he challenged the Big 4 music companies to allow the iTunes Music Store to sell music free from digital rights management, making it playable on any player, as many computers as you'd like, and burnt to CD an unlimited number of times. I'd guess that was only the public spearhead of the pressure Apple applied, because it's taken less than two months for first of the Big 4 to crack.

But (there's always a but, isn't there?) it comes at a price.

Sounds a bit like a backdoor price increase to me. It's well known that those same Big 4 have been pressuring Steve to up the price of iTunes downloads for some time, and this announcement smells like compromise, especially considering what Jobs said in his challenge...

So why do the $0.99 DRM laced downloads persist? What are the odds EMI would only agree to dropping DRM in exchange for a price hike, and Apple didn't want to lose the ability to advertise their songs as $0.99 downloads?

At the moment the consumer hasn't lost anything, the old products will still be available and the choice will be ours, with Jobs expecting more than half of the iTunes store's downloads to be DRM free by year's end. Still, I can't help feeling we've taken the step forward, but are just waiting for the two steps back, when Apple drops the cheaper DRM versions and leaves us all with more expensive music.

Some people whistle while they work; I listen to music. Depending on where I’m working, I’ll listen to iTunes or Amarok, and occasionally even put on the radio to remember why I stopped listening to the radio in the first place.

Even though Amarok blows iTunes away in many departments, I like iTunes, and believe it's a great bit of software, especially for users like my parents: it’s easy to use, hard to break (unless you’re really trying to fuck something up) and it looks pretty, especially since they integrated Cover Flow. I think iTunes can be better, though, and since I’m not a programmer (though I once played a Nanite creator on TV) I puzzled out some idealistic ways that I think iTunes could be dialed up a little bit closer to Awesome.

I kept a couple of criteria in mind as I made this list: I think the average iTunes user doesn’t want to mess around with AppleScript or do anything which involves the command line. I think they enjoy many of the “set it and forget it” features iTunes incorporates (like scheduling podcast downloads, auto-updating iPods when you connect them, etc.,) and enjoy that (most of the time,) iTunes “just works.”

So with all that in mind, here we go . . .

1. Eliminate crippling DRM from the iTunes Music Store.
Steve Jobs says that he only has DRM in iTMS purchases because the big evil music publishers won’t let him sell their songs without it. If that’s the case, what about the indie labels who believe that obscurity is a greater threat than piracy, and don’t want their files to be sold with crippling DRM? If that’s the case, why not really play hardball with UMG and the rest of them and force them to give up the DRM? The iTunes Music Store is the unquestioned industry leader; where are they going to go? Microsoft? Ha. Ha. It is to laugh.

I think Jobs’ blog post made for some great PR a month or so ago, but I don’t think that he is truly serious about removing DRM from anything -- at least in the near future -- because we all know that the DRM isn’t there to protect files as much as it’s there to force iTunes users to buy and use iPods. Sure, I can burn and rip my iTMS purchases to get rid of the DRM, or run some third party application, but that’s an annoying pain in the ass, and this is all about being easy peasy, remember? (Please note that I love my iPod, especially my shuffle, but I also love the idea that once I pay for something it’s mine, including music. If I want to play it on a Zen or add it to a Linux library, then I should be able to do that without a lot of complicated bullshit.) So the first thing is, we kill all the DRM.

2. Amarok’s greatest hits
Amarok is filled with insanely cool features that excite music nerds almost as much as finding a box filled with Blue Note acetates at a yard sale. They’re designed to encourage listeners to “rediscover [their] music” but Apple could take that rediscovering one step further, and turn it into (DRM-free) purchases: With Cover Flow, I can flip through my music collection, which looks cool, but is not especially useful. Well, taking a page from Amarok, what if I could control-click on a Cover Flow image, and get access to the artist’s Wikipedia page, song lyrics, and MusicBrainz information? The closest iTunes currently comes to this sort of rockin’ feature is the Ministore, which doesn’t work with streaming radio, only provides links to similar artists, and really feels like irritating advertising more than anything else. For those of you scoring at home: irritating=BAD! cool and useful=GOOD!

3. Take my money, please!
You know what I love about the iTunes Music Store? How stupidly easy it is to fill up my collection with back catalog stuff, buy iMixes and essentials, and enjoy the nearly-instant gratification of the 1-click purchase. (In fact, it’s so easy to do this, I advise avoiding what my friend Margaret and I called “the iTunes bender,” where you find yourself two and one-half sheets to the wind, buying music from iTunes because, “OH MY GOD MAN I FUCKING LOVED THIS SONG SO MUCH IN HIGH SCHOOL!!1!” only to crawl out of your hangover the next day and wonder what the hell you’re going to do with all that new Rick Springfield music.)

In addition to the iTMS, there are several other great online music sellers that fly below the radar of most consumers (CD Baby, eMusic, and Magnatune all come to mind.) Wouldn’t it be great if iTunes had native support for these alternative music stores, so buying music from them would be as easy – and as integrated – as buying from the iTMS? In place of my pathetic photoshop and gimp skills, imagine little green icons for these other stores, sitting in iTunes next to the iTunes Store icon. Don't want to see them? No problem, they could be included or excluded in your preferences. If Apple really does make most of their money from iPod sales, this would be a winner for consumers, artists, and Apple. (File this one under Totally Idealistic Ideas Which Will Never Come To Pass But Would Still Be Pretty Neat-o.)

4. There are many copies
My wife, my son, and I all have separate accounts on our iMac, and we each have our own iTunes library to sync up to our own iPods. My son and I have a lot of crossover in our libraries (What can I say? The kid has good taste) so there is a ton of hard disk space wasted by duplicate files. On my Linux machine, I solved this problem by putting my music collection into /etc/Music, and making it accessible to all users on the machine. It’s possible to do something similar on my Mac, but it’s a colossal pain in the ass, and it's totally not something my parents could do. I’d love it if Apple would make it a simple option to keep all the ripped and purchased music in a directory that all users on the machine can read and write. When I add music, it automatically goes into my library and onto my iPod; when my wife or son add music, it tells me that there’s new music in /users/itunes/ and gives me the option of adding it, or ignoring it. Think of it as a media server, but on the same machine. We'll save space, we'll encourage each other to listen to new music, and since we can already share music across the LAN, and even the assclowns at the RIAA say families can share CDs (how mag-fucking-nanimous of them) this one may actually happen. What? Stop laughing!

5. Odds ‘n Ends
Finally, there are a few little tweaks that would vastly improve my iTunes experience, which is important, because it’s all about me.

I’d like a simple keyboard shortcut to rate songs. There are all these songs in my library which are unrated, because it’s a pain in the ass to switch to iTunes, click on the song that’s playing, and then adjust the rating. I like it that I can pretty quickly spin the wheel on my iPod to rate songs, so why not something just as easy when I’m sitting at the machine? A meta-key and a mouse gesture, a meta-key and a number, or just a dashboard widget, or something would make my smart playlists much more useful and current (yeah, “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” was totally five stars in December. Now? Not so much.)

Speaking of Christmas, you know how you get all that seasonal music in there, and you’re left with the option of manually unchecking each song, selecting them all as a group and excluding them from shuffle, or removing them entirely, just so you can add them back in next year? I’d like an advanced feature where I can tell iTunes, “This is Halloween Music. I want to you put it into my library on September 30, and take it out on November 2.” or “This is Christmas Music. I want you to start playing this on November 28, and take it out on January 5.” Set it and forget it is cool, guys. Make it automatically archive the removed files, and I'll buy you a donut. Hell, I'll buy you two donuts.

Finally, one idea I had has been reported on Ars Technica as actually happening: Credit for individual songs if you buy the album later. Have you ever bought some songs as part of an iMix, and liked one of them so much, you end up buying the whole album? Now you have a stupid duplicate song cluttering up your library, and you spent an extra dollar, (which you’ve recently learned the value of, if only to shut up your parents.) I love the idea of giving consumers a store credit, and I think that this will ultimately lead to Apple selling more music, as potential customers become more comfortable buying essential collections and singles, secure in the knowledge that they can buy the whole album later without getting screwed. Nice.

iCould go on, but iWon't
I’ve tried my best to beat this horse to death, but it keeps squirming around, so let me take one last whack at it: I know that there are countless reasons most of these suggestions won’t ever be adopted, and I also know that some of these functions can be currently handled by AppleScript, command-line hacking, or some combination of shenanigans and hijinks. I also realize that to some purists, iTunes and everything it stands for are big evil suck-o-trons. But Apple's developers have proved again and again that software can be both easy to use and full-featured. iTunes is the massive leader in online music purchases, so they're clearly doing something right. iLike iTunes, (iN iTheory, iAnyway) and would love to see it get (more) awesome.

Okay, the horse is dead, and that's my wishlist. What's yours?

Wil Wheaton feels the Illinoise.

Capturing the essence of iTunes, and the function of MySpace, PhilaFunk.com is a "social music store." The site wa designed to be a haven for indie musicians, for .80 cents of every .99 cent song sold goes to the musician. This way musicians get paid, have a social network to attract new listeners, and little need for a record label. However, MySpace themselves intend on launching a similar service soon.

Unfortunately, indie services can only really launch someone into getting a record deal, rather then provide an end all solution to remove record labels from the music industry. This type of service can also potentially help an upcoming band make a few bucks early on, but not necessarily allow them to quit their day jobs.